George Gilder: "Something happened in the twentieth century when the Jews became a dominant intellectual force..."

Sorry, Gilder, but the Jews were a dominant intellectual force in the Nineteenth Century, too.

Since the first time I heard Gilder's thesis that men were evolutionarily driven to rape, I knew he was intellectually vapid. He has never thought through the consequences of this idea.

Sure, a man who raped twenty women would have dispersed his seed among them, maybe five times as much as a man who remains monogamous. Of course, not every rape results in a pregnancy, and the rapist would have to rape a hundred women to conceive even a few babies. Meanwhile, the brothers, husbands, or fathers of the raped women will undoubtedly take action against the rapist. He likely ends up dead before he even spawns three babies.

Okay, so that's two babies produced that wouldn't have been born otherwise. A success? Remember, ancient man killed unwanted babies. Most likely prehistoric man also killed such infants. But what if they didn't, and allowed the un-partnered mother to raise the baby alone? Well, we know that in the hunter-gatherer society, a single woman would hardly succeed to gather enough to keep a baby alive long enough to grow up. End of the rapist's seed, end of the genetic imperative to rape.

Evolutionary psychology is a very discredited field. Gilder should have shut up long ago. There was an article about this in the Wall Street Journal several months ago; I'm astonished Prager didn't read it. When all the factors are taken into account, the numbers show that rape is a very unfavorable way for a strand of DNA to carry on, at least among the human species. But, because Prager loves it as an explanation for his own wandering eye, he continues espousing it twenty years after it was shown to be a fatally flawed theory.

Read and learn, Prager. It's dead.